The New and the Old

Jason takes a look at new commercial offerings for Linux and freeware ported from antique software.

Since this column was first launched,
Linux has increased its hoard of commercial games manyfold (not
that we cover commercial games here), and the free offerings are
sprouting and growing all over the hills and under the hills, some
to rather large and sophisticated packages, and all of them
expanding the code base across the board. Serious folk often write
off games as fluff; after all, computers are serious machines for
serious work—work, work, never shirk. Let's be honest, though;
games drive the hardware industry, particularly in graphics cards,
sound cards and processors. I feel games will help encourage
vendors to release their hardware specifications and drivers for
Linux—a necessity for a gaming environment, especially more
multimedia support. Serious people can moan all they want about how
Linux is a server OS for serious applications and how gamers should
buzz off, but we know world domination comes through games and
multimedia.

Speaking of games and multimedia, for the last couple of
months we've been looking at emulating old Arcade and C64 games on
Linux, and during that time, there's been a bit of development
going on. On the commercial front, we've come a long way since the
days of Doom, Quake, and the first Loki mega-port, Civilization:
Call to Power. Nowadays, Quake III is the order of the day, and
rest assured, it's available for Linux (and runs fine on the Crusoe
chips). Loki is about to unleash several new ports, such as Alpha
Centauri (the sequel to Civilization, as one might infer), Heroes
of Might and Magic III, Heretic II, SimCity 3000 and Soldier of
Fortune. The Linux gaming scene can also welcome two relatively new
entrants to its niche: MP Entertainment, who delivered the
comic-book-quality animated adventure Hopkins FBI (which I
really intend to review one of these days) and
BlackHoleSun Software, which first appeared with the simple game
Krilo and is following up with a new project called C4 that looks
to be on DVD, if we ever resolve the whole DVD-on-Linux
crisis.

Now, even though many of us aren't in love with proprietary
software, these games have a benefit in that they draw teenage
dollars and interest: dollars to give developers an incentive to
support Linux with hardware drivers, and interest to get future
hackers into Linux, where we can all benefit from their brain power
in years to come. Teenage brains have flexible neurons, probably a
necessity for learning a complicated OS. With hardware support and
fleets of new hackers, Linux will be loved and supported for years
to come. We'll have the whole world running free software. Even
though those kids spent their money on video games, we can be
playing free offerings like those described here.

We all love antique anything, although if we were part of the
neo-conformist, 1950-was-a-good-year martini crowd, we might choose
the word “vintage”. Whether it's the ravers going on about the
808/909 vintage sounds, the antiquity Goths scouring antique (er,
junk) shops for Victorian trinkets, the nouveau-riche wine tasters,
the I-want-to-look-like-everyone-else-on-campus recycled clothing
fanatics, the whole retro movement which never goes away yet
changes its targets of imitation and afflicts hordes of different
troupes simultaneously, or even the weirdo computer types who
search out old software and insist on running 30-year-old editors
and operating systems—well, you get the point. There's a deep
human drive to go backward and worship the old rather than pushing
forward to find new frontiers. Here is a game to satisfy both
worshippers of everything aged and those who like new ideas.

Figure 1. XInvaders 3D

XInvaders 3D (see Figure 1) from Don Llopis is Space Invaders
with a twist, a warp, a new dimension. Yes, that's it, a new
dimension: when the aliens come at you, they come
at you. If you were a fan of the original,
you'll be amused to no end by this one. The game is fairly new, so
it's not perfect; for example, the graphics don't scale
automatically to the size of the window, and there isn't music yet
(I suspect a MOD soundtrack just might be on
the way). Other than that, it's an awesome take on a classic
design. Just wait for the filled vector graphs, texture maps,
real-time ray tracing. See
www.fiu.edu/~dllopi01/xinv3d.htm.

Figure 2. Circus Linux!

Another antique to take a look at is Circus Linux! by Bill
Kendrick of New Breed Software. Bill is an interesting fellow who
has developed a ton of games for Linux including BoboBot,
Defendguin, Gem Drop, ICBM3D & ICBM3D/2, Mad Bomber, 3D Pong,
VidSlide and X-Bomber, so I suppose we'll be hearing his name a
lot. Circus Linux! is his latest, a Linux remake of the classic (?)
Atari 2600 game Circus Atari. You launch circus clowns from a
teeter-totter, pop colorful balloons and catch the poor flying
fellows, lest they be ill-affected by gravity. Check out
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/circus-linux/
for clowns, balloons and so much more.

a print of King Tut himself or do you have exciting Egyptian
graphics, especially Tut, spiders, flies, and other beasts?]

Tutanchamun is a very boring game—just kidding! Actually,
Tutankhamen was one of my favorite games on the old Atari. The
Atari's chip set is notoriously difficult to emulate, but
fortunately we're spared the effort. David Kastrup brought
Tutanchamun to Linux. There's an added bonus: David never actually
played the original, so what we have is a new interpretation rather
than a direct port, a game where the idea was passed from one
person to another and morphed into something new, similar to the
way urban legends are thought to form. This one is really cute,
with the rough, low-resolution graphics and simple game play that
fire up the imagination. The Tutankhamen meme mutates and lives!
You can get it from
metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games/arcade/tutanchamun-0.1.1.tar.gz.

Linux Journal's technical editor
Jason Kroll
(hyena@ssc.com) suspects that the ability to create a world in our
own image is a more powerful incentive in the development of
GNU/Linux than the supposed value of peer status.

Trending Topics

Upcoming Webinar

Getting Started with DevOps - Including New Data on IT Performance from Puppet Labs 2015 State of DevOps Report

August 27, 2015
12:00 PM CDT

DevOps represents a profound change from the way most IT departments have traditionally worked: from siloed teams and high-anxiety releases to everyone collaborating on uneventful and more frequent releases of higher-quality code. It doesn't matter how large or small an organization is, or even whether it's historically slow moving or risk averse — there are ways to adopt DevOps sanely, and get measurable results in just weeks.